Circle Dock is a free, customizable launcher in the shape of a circular dock that can grant instant access to your favorite programs, files, or folders. If you’re looking for a launcher for your favorite apps, folders, and/or files take a look at this one. Circle Dock looks like a circular version of the Mac dock and manages a balance between being useful and practical on the one hand and providing a visually interesting launcher with a lot of room for creative customization and on the other. More notes below:

Activated by hotkey: (F1) by default. Also invoked by middle mouse-button and moving the mouse over a side of the screen. All of these can be customized and/or switched off (which is good if you, like me, don’t care much for things popping up on screen when you accidentally move the mouse over the edge).

Drag and drop: to add icons to the launcher simply drag and drop program execs, files, folders, bookmarks, etc. Dropping shortcuts will work too, except the launcher will always point to those shortcuts rather than their target destination and the connection will break if the shortcuts are removed or moved.

Behavior: you can rotate icons on the circular "disc" with the arrow keys or mouse wheel. Great effect, but apparently has no practical function. Hovering over the icons will display the title of the program, file, or folder.

Managing shortcuts: done by right-clicking on the icon, whereby both the Windows context menu entries and the Circle dock entries are available. You can set command line parameters for each item on the dock as well as the startup folder. You can also drag and drop icons to change their placement.

Organize in dock folders: you can create dock folders that can help organize your shortcuts (e.g. a folder for bookmarks or for your personal files or for all video-related software, etc). Clicking on the button in the middle of the launcher will bring you back from folder view into the main view.

Customizable: most every feature can be changed/customized in the settings section, including the icons, the visual style of the dock itself (as well as it’s width, transparency, etc.) as well as the "button" at the center of the dock. The behavior of most every visual element is customizable as well.

Icons: comes with a large collection of cool icons that can be used to further customize your apps and folders, should you feel that the default icons are not up to the coolness standards required.

Memory consumption: approx 10 megs or so, it seems. This is a .NET app so memory use is a bit ambiguous - I’ve seen it at as little as 6 megs and as high as 11 megs. Memory use seems reasonable/acceptable overall.

Installation: unzip and run. Not a portable app though as it requires .NET. Add to the startup folder if you want it to start with Windows.